I'm director of the Reynolds Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School at Arizona State. I'm also author of the Forbes eBook Curbing Cars: America's Independence From The Auto Industry. I was Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times, and led Changing Gears, a public media project that studied the industrial Midwest. E: vmaynard@umich.edu T @mickimaynard @curbingcars

Three Key Reasons Why The South Will Keep Fighting The UAW

The United Auto Workers union can’t be blamed if it is still in shock this weekend. Late Friday, workers at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., defeated a union organizing drive that until this past week looked like a sure thing.

The VW workers, who seemed bound to give the UAW the Southern car plant victory it has long sought, instead turned down union membership by a margin of about 54 percent to 46 percent.

That margin spelled trouble for two reasons. First, it was a loss, and second, it showed how much ground the UAW has to make up if it ever hopes to win a VW vote.

Ideally, unions need more than a simple majority in organizing drives. They like to win at least two-thirds support, in order to provide ammunition against legal challenges, and show that that workers definitively wanted to join.

This defeat happened even though VW was officially neutral in the organizing drive, a stance that in corporate terms is akin to cheering the union on.

Many non-Southern observers were stunned, but they should not have been. Late last week, rumors were quietly circulating in Southern business circles that the UAW was likely to lose, in large part because of an anti-union campaign led by Tennessee Republican Sen. Robert Corker Jr.

Corker was the mayor of Chattanooga when the plant was originally conceived, and he fought hard in the Senate to push the UAW to agree to wage and benefit cuts as part of a 2008 auto bailout that eventually failed, leaving a rescue plan up to the Bush and Obama administrations.

Corker’s battle against the UAW wasn’t just a one-off situation, however. For years, Southern government officials, business leaders and auto company employees have aligned themselves against the UAW.

They are not about to stop fighting now. And, the defeat of the UAW at Volkswagen shows just how powerful a force this anti-union feeling is across the region.

Of course, there are exceptions. For years, the UAW represented workers at Detroit manufacturing facilities across the South, many of which are now closed. Other unions, like steel, textile and rubber workers, have represented workers at southern plants.

But by and large, the South has kept many unions out, through Right to Work laws that prevent them from automatically collecting dues, to individual campaigns in towns like Tupelo, Miss., against labor organizations.

There are three major reasons why Corker’s anti-UAW campaign, and the other efforts to keep out unions will go on.

The Southern brand. Simply put, the South has branded itself across the United States and to global companies as a union-free zone. There is no starker picture of this than the auto companies.

In more than 30 years, none of the free-standing assembly plants owned by foreign manufacturers in the United States have ever been organized. (This doesn’t include factories that originally began as joint ventures, such as the former Chrysler-Mitsubishi plant in Illinois or the General MotorsGeneral Motors-Toyota joint venture factory in Fremont, Calif., now home to Tesla.)

The UAW has tried various degrees of organizing drives at Nissan, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota and Mercedes-BenzMercedes-Benz, to name a few. Every single time, the UAW has been pushed back. Why? Because the message the South sent to foreign manufacturers was, “Come here, and we’ll keep unions out.”

Even if a company like VW doesn’t fight, others like Corker will do so for them. And I’m not 100 percent convinced that Corker didn’t get a wink and a nod from the German company to do battle on its behalf. VW is making important decisions on where to make future investments. Turning down the UAW is a point on Chattanooga’s favor.

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